Phédre

Daps; 2012

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Music from this release

The NSFW video for Phédre's "In Decay", their debut album's first single, serves as a proper introduction to the band. It looks like an outtake from Caligula, showing a world drenched in honey and other viscous liquids and engulfed in gaudy vulgarity. The song, like some put-through-the-dryer version of Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er", hops with a jovial reggae skip and gobbles up a variety of 1970s tropes (classic rock, disco, post-punk, others) before regurgitating them in a fashionably chewed-up, half-digested mass of musical references. Ariel Pink with a French-Canadian sneer?

Yes, this is record-collector rock for 2012, with all the flitting allegiances, stylistic dalliances, and short attention spans that come with the post-Tumblr world. It's a strange, lo-fi space where synths strain to possess color and the drum machines drag and sigh with VHS vapor trails: It all sounds a little dreamlike, but the rough textures keep it from blurring together too much. Aside from noodling synths and heavily affected guitars, the group's most distinctive element is its anonymous vocalists. The female singer bleats in a childlike speak-sing that resembles the Velvet Underground's Mo Tucker, while the lead dude sounds like a post-punk approximation of late-seventies David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Their voices aren't particularly strong, but they can work when allowed to carry a decent melody, as on "In Decay". The wonderful synth motifs on "Cold Sunday", on the other hand, are dragged down by the apathetic singing and god-awful attempt at rapping.

Bizarre attempts at hip-hop pastiche aside, Phédre often strike a rockabilly and doo-wop vein that sounds more than a little like a chill/goth update on the Cramps. And they're most comfortable in an explicitly retro role: "Ode to the Swinger" is a deadpan surf-rock jam where the vocalists' apparent boredom works in their favor, and the doo-wop ebb-and-flow of "Love Ablaze" is delectably catchy, undercut by what sounds like a tortured organ (think "White Light/White Heat"). As a whole, Phédre is about contrast-- pretty melodies sung in squawks, propulsive rhythms that never quite move anywhere, grandiosity rendered in 256 colors-- which, over the course of a full record, leads to a decidedly uneven listen. Phédre is the sound of a band trying to do too many things at once in too short of a time. They're clearly a playful bunch and have a melodic knack to match their visual aesthetic. Now they just need to sit down and flesh out the music some more.